


The Chambered Heart

by MrsVarenhoff



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Angst, Daddy Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-22
Packaged: 2018-03-11 09:06:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3321758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsVarenhoff/pseuds/MrsVarenhoff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by <a href="http://kaciart.tumblr.com/post/107927242858">this heart-stopping piece of fanart</a> that reimagines the end of The Battle of the Five Armies with Legolas finding a badly wounded Thranduil on the slopes of Raven Hill. As Thranduil lies on the border of death, Legolas must come to terms with the strained nature of their relationship and his own guilt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Based as much as possible within the movieverse, only adding supporting characters when needed. Be warned that I like Tauriel and Kiliel, just so you know but the heart of this story is the relationship between Legolas and Thranduil.

She was deaf to him. If he had been little to her before, he was nothing now, all of her being focused on the dead body of the dwarf in her arms. She had never wanted his love and she did not need his comfort, and indeed there was no comfort he could give, to her or to himself. They had each loved and each lost and their hearts would never mend. She would never look to him now. He turned away.

From the promontory of Raven Hill, he could see the battle ending below as the great eagles swept in. He was not needed there. He was not needed here with her. He thought of Mirkwood, of his father’s realm carved beneath the earth, shut away from the world, from further risk of hurt and loss. He understood now why his father had hidden himself there, and the urge to run to that safe hold was strong, but he had seen what it had done to his father and was beginning to realize what it had done to him.

Trained up as a warrior whose one goal was to protect those within and keep the world out, he had never learned to open his heart and had not known how to touch hers until it was too late, until the dark-haired dwarf with his quick smile and love of the world she longed to explore had drawn her away.

The fierce dart of anger he had felt towards his father when he had come upon him in Dale, Thranduil’s sword at Tauriel’s throat, flamed within him. Not only anger and disgust that his father might have killed her but for the faults within himself that had made it impossible for him to win Tauriel’s love. This king whose heart was surrounded by a wall too vast for even his son to breach had taught him only fear in the guise of caution. The love he had borne his father had always taken the form of respect and was only ever returned with stern approbation and never warmth. He realized now that everything he had done in his father’s name had been in hopes of drawing something more from him, in the belief that he had more to give. That moment in the streets of Dale had broken wide that love and respect and brought the image of his father crashing down in ruins in his mind.

There was no love in him.

And now Legolas felt as if all of his life had been for nothing, in pursuit of that which did not exist, and it had cost him dearly. The thought of returning to the blighted forest of Mirkwood was impossible. Yet where was he to go?

“Are we not part of this world?” Tauriel had chided him.

His father had taught him that the world offered only danger, but his father had been wrong about many things. With new purpose, he headed back through the ruins of the guard tower, stepping over the bodies of slain orcs. He would get a horse, ride out into that world and see if he could not somewhere find something of the wonder and delight that she had sought and the dwarf had known.

But as he started down the steep climb from Raven Hill, he saw a familiar figure approaching. Feren, his father’s equerry, come once again on his father’s orders to bring him back. The fire of anger in his breast surged. He would not see his father, not now, perhaps not for many years.

“My lord Legolas!” Feren called.

“Hold your peace, Feren,” Legolas said. “I know what you have come to say and you can tell my father—”

“No, my lord!” Feren broke into a run and closed the distance between them. When he reached Legolas, he stopped and hastily bowed his head. “I have not come from your father. I have come seeking him.”

Legolas frowned and made to step around the equerry.

“I have not seen him.”

“But he came after you, followed you here.”

“To drag me back? To punish me?” Legolas spat over his shoulder

“No, my lord,” Feren called after him. “He—he feared for you.”

Legolas paused and said without turning, “Where is his guard?”

“He outstripped them,” Feren said. “When he heard that you had been seen fighting on Raven Hill, he took a horse and the last we saw of him, he was riding out to find you. His guard is searching for him now.”

Feren’s words were like a cold wind. Legolas stiffened.

“He could not have ridden a horse up here,” he said. “He will be on foot.”

“My lord, he was not on the path.”

His anger damped by that cold wind, Legolas turned and took the sword in Feren’s hand.

“Go,” he ordered. “Find his guard.”

Without waiting to see if Feren obeyed, Legolas sprang down the jagged hillside, moving with ease from rock to rock, his eyes darting as deftly as his feet, in search of the silver-clad figure of his father. Where would he have gone if he had not come up the hill? Had he seen the fight with Bolg on the fallen tower? He might be searching among those ruins for his son. That would be why there was no sign of him on the hill. He would be in the valley, frustrated, still furious with his son, but alive.

Legolas turned to find a foothold that would lead in the direction of the valley and spotted a ledge—and sprawled on the ledge, a figure on its back, a figure in silver armor. The cold wind was now ice that froze him where he stood. How long he stood he did not know, how long before he was able to throw back his head and cry.

“FEREN!”

He was moving again, running without thinking, as rocks slid from under his once-sure feet, scrambling, nearly falling, he reached the ledge and stopped, any hope that it was someone else, that it was a trick of the light, doused. Thranduil lay motionless, arms outflung, his body twisted slightly, one leg bent across the other, his hair splayed across the rock like a frozen, fractured stream. Legolas forced himself forward, his slack arm dragging Feren’s sword across the rock, sending a ringing call over the valley. He stopped at Thranduil’s side and stood, staring down.

“Father?” It was less than a whisper, not even a question asking a response but more a desperate wish that what he saw was not true.

But it was true. His father, who had seen war and fought dragons, who had held the world at bay, lay here now, broken and unmoving—because of him.

It could not be. It could not. Feren’s sword fell from his hand and he dropped to his knees, frantically tearing at the fastenings of Thranduil’s beautiful armor. Casting the breastplate aside, he pressed his head against his father’s chest, listening, feeling for any sign of life. His own blood pounded so hard in his ear, he was not sure if what he heard was his father’s pulse or his own.

Where was he injured? Dark slashes of orc blood had dried on his face. Legolas pushed himself up to search for a wound. The hand that had slipped around Thranduil’s head came away bright red with blood. Not orc blood. Elf blood. He reached for his father’s head, his fingers tangled in Thranduil’s blood-wet hair.

“Father?” This time, it was an appeal, the ageless plea of a confused and frightened child. “Father?”

A hand touched his shoulder and he spun about to see Feren and the king’s guard behind him. He had not even heard their approach.

“Is he—” Feren’s voice broke, dread twisting his usually impassive face. “Is he dead?”

“No,” Legolas said, closing his hand on his father’s blood. “I don’t think so.” He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he breathed.

Feren went down on one knee next to Legolas and placed his hand on the king’s chest. Legolas watched the equerry’s face as the lines of fear eased.

“He breathes,” Feren said, “but barely.”

His formal, emotionless mask back in place, Feren stood and motioned to the guard. Four of the elves stepped forward.

“Let them by, my lord,” Feren said gently.

Legolas stumbled to his feet and pressed himself against the side of the cliff. The elves bent and lifted their king. The back plate of his armor fell with a clamor. Making a sling of their linked arms, they carried him off the ledge.

“Where will they take him?” Legolas asked.

Feren retrieved his sword and sheathed it.

“Into Dale.” He bent and picked up the pieces of Thranduil’s armor, turned and looked long at Legolas. He had no authority to command the prince, and so he made it a question. “You will come?”

Legolas straightened, lifted his head, some sense of himself returning. “Of course,” he said.

As he stepped away from the cliff face, his foot kicked something that made a metallic scrape against the rock. He looked down to see one of his father’s long, elegant swords at his feet. He picked it up, the metal cold against his skin. He searched for a moment for its twin but could not find it and having no sheath, gripped it as he followed after Feren, the weight of it unfamiliar and unwieldy in his hand.


	2. Chapter 2

The progress off the mountain and across the valley into Dale had been maddeningly slow. As the company crossed the battlefield littered with the dead, they were joined by the survivors of the elven army, who closed ranks around their fallen king, many of whom tried but could not prevail upon the four members of the guard to share their burden.

Legolas kept pace behind the guard, watching his father’s hair sway back and forth in front of him. The rhythmic tramp of the army around him hammered at his thoughts, _your fault, your fault, this is all your fault,_ until he wanted to turn, to push his way through the lines of stone-faced soldiers, find that horse and run, as unable to face his father’s wounds as he was his cold heart.

But did a cold heart ride alone into an army of orcs to find a son who had disobeyed and disdained him, defied him in front of his own people, betrayed him by taking the part of a traitor? For it had been treason for Tauriel to raise her weapon against her king. Aye, and the king would have killed her for her crime, he told himself. Legolas knew that his own threat had been an essentially empty one. His father could have ordered his guards to hold Legolas if he had tried to defend Tauriel, while Thranduil carried out a death sentence, and he would have been within his rights. Yet he let her walk away. No, that was not the act of a cold heart.

Legolas accepted the penance of the slow march into Dale, where the men who stood guard at the gate stepped aside, their heads bowed in reverence for the aloof king who had nevertheless come to their aid. He heard Feren behind him say to one of them “Send for your king,” and vaguely wondered who that was. Laketown had no king.

The guard carried their own king through the marketplace, where in the aftermath of the battle, Thranduil’s tent was a scattered ruin of shredded cloth and broken poles. A woman stepped from the shadowed doorway of a large building to the east of the market square. A small woman in a tattered brown coat and what looked to be the remains of a feed bag for a hat, she had a kindly smile as she motioned to them.

“Bring him in here.”

She ushered them into what had been the Great Hall of Dale, where the wounded of Laketown had been brought to be cared for, stretched in ragged rows on beds of straw and bits of cloth on the stone floor. There was, at least, a fire blazing in a large brazier in the center of the hall. Still, Legolas could not think the woman meant to place Thranduil among these. The guard obviously agreed, for they stood and made no move to lower their burden.

“Follow me,” the woman said, and she led them across the hall, stepping carefully among the injured, to the curtained door of an antechamber where a more substantial bed of upturned boxes and pillows and thin blankets had been prepared. Another fire burned in a smaller grate and the room was lit by a broad window, covered in frost. Below the window, on a bench carved into the wall, sat a girl, a young woman, who looked up with anticipated fear when they entered.

“This was prepared for Master Bard, should it be needed,” the woman said. “He would offer it without hesitation, I am quite sure.”

The guard laid the inert body of the king upon the makeshift bed, turned and marched out of the room, two of their number positioning themselves by the door, leaving Feren, Legolas, the woman and the girl alone with the king.

The woman bent over the king and placed her hand on his head like a mother to a child, though the king was many thousands of years older than she.

“Can you heal him?” Legolas asked the woman.

“Me, sir?” She looked at him in wide-eyed surprise. “No. I can clean and bind his wounds and tend him, but I am no healer. There must be some among your people. I have heard tales of the way of elves with medicine.”

“The healer who traveled with the army was killed,” Feren said.

“Is there no one else?”

“There is!” The girl stood and came towards them. “Tauriel,” she said to Legolas, then turned to the old woman. “She that brought Tilda and me safely out of Laketown. I saw her save a dwarf that was dying in our own house.”

Legolas regarded her again, barely remembering her from the house where they had tracked Tauriel’s dwarf and where the orcs had attacked.

“Tauriel—” he began but could not finish what he meant to say. “She is not here.”

“Is she hurt?” The girl’s face puckered with worry.

“No, but she cannot come.”

“Can you not heal him, sir?” the old woman asked.

Legolas shook his head. “It is a skill I do not possess.”

“Tauriel used kingsfoil to heal the dwarf,” the girl said. “Will that heal him?”

“Not alone,” Feren said, seeing that Legolas would not respond and had walked away, his back to the room, looking unseeingly out the frosted windows. “But it would ease him, if there was any to be had.”

“It’s but a weed, sir,” the old woman said. “We do not keep it among our stores.”

“Is this enough?”

The girl reached into the pocket of her skirt and slowly withdrew four or five stems of the wilted, hoary weed and held it out to Feren.

“I was saving it,” she said, apologetically, “in case Da had need of it.”

“Love you, child,” the old woman said. “Fortunate indeed that he does not. Now what did the she-elf do with it? Do you remember?”

She reached for the athelas, but Feren stopped her.

“My lord Legolas,” he said. “There is but a little amount here. It would be used more wisely in practiced hands.”

Legolas turned from the blank white window. Tauriel would know how to use it. What could he do? She would not come on her own, of that he was certain. Why should she come to the aid of the one who had banished her, who had denied the truth of what she felt. He could have her dragged back, but he could not force her to heal his father.

The curtain over the door parted and the elven guards stepped back to let Bard pass. Covered in the dust of battle, his face streaked with dirt and orc blood and drawn with weariness, he made first for the girl, his daughter, took her in his arms and kissed the top of her head.

“Where is Tilda?” he murmured into her hair.

“Upstairs, sleeping.”

“What is this?” He released the girl and stepped back. “They told me King Thranduil had sent—” At the sight of the elvenking laid upon the crude bed, his words cut off. “What has happened?”

“My lord is grievous wounded,” Feren said. “We seek shelter for him here.”

“Of course,” Bard said. “But there are no houses of healing here. We have no such arts.”

“We have kingsfoil, Da.” The girl held out the stems and told him how Tauriel had saved the dwarf.

“The common folk believe that it has power in the hands of a king.” Legolas stepped forward with renewed hope. “If you were to use it, perhaps…”

Bard looked at the pleading face of the elf in confusion.

“Me? I am no king.”

“We sent for the king of Dale,” Feren said, bending his head in respect, “and you came, my lord.”

Bard sighed in frustration.

“Sigrid,” he said to his daughter, “go and sit with Tilda. See that she’s all right. Yes, give me the kingsfoil. Aggie.” He turned to the old woman. “Bring a bowl of hot water and a cloth.”

When they had gone, he knelt beside the bed and gingerly parted Thranduil’s blood-matted hair to see the wound. The gash was long and blood still oozed freely, but more concerning was the slow trickle of dark blood that ran from the elvenking’s ear. Bard had seen injuries like this before and doubted a few crushed herbs would help.

“How did this happen?” he asked. “I saw him fight. No orc blade could touch him.”

“He must have been ambushed,” Feren said.

“Must have been?” Bard tossed over his shoulder. “Did no one see?”

“He was alone.”

Bard stood and crossed the room to Legolas.

“I am no king,” he repeated. “Even if I was, I could not heal this. He needs elvish medicine, but I doubt he would survive the trip back to Mirkwood. You must send for someone. Quickly.”

Legolas looked over the bowman’s shoulder at his father, lifeless and unmoving on the bed.

“It is two days to Mirkwood and back,” he said, leaving the question hanging in the air between himself and the bowman. Would his father last that long?

The bowman’s kind eyes were serious as they locked onto his.

“And there is no one among your company who can help him?”

The image of Tauriel cradling her heartbreak on the forbidding slopes of Raven Hill flashed in his mind. He shook his head.

“No one.”

“Then send for someone,” Bard said. “Hurry.”

The sound of a commotion from without drew their attention and a boy’s voice shouted.

“Da! Let me by! Da!”

“Bain!” Bard tore back the curtains. “He’s my son. Let him through!”

The guards stepped back and a slim youth with a head of soft brown curls bolted into the chamber.

“Da, there’s a dwarf at the gate! He’s demanding to see the elvenking.” The boy stopped much as his father had done and stared at the unconscious king. “Is he dead?” he asked in blank surprise.

“No, Bain. What does the dwarf want?”

“His message is for King Thranduil, he said.”

Bard turned to Legolas.

“Will you speak to him?”

Suddenly eager to be out of the chamber, to be doing something, anything, Legolas nodded. As he strode from the room, he heard the boy say to his father “So many of them dead. I thought that elves were immortal.”

“Immortal does not mean they cannot die,” the bowman replied. “But they do not die easy.”

Legolas quickened his pace. Out in the square, Feren—who had followed him—motioned for a squadron of the elven soldiers to accompany them to the gate of Dale.

Legolas did not recognize the dwarves that were waiting. None of them were from Thorin Oakenshield’s company.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

“Our message is for King Thranduil,” said the dwarf who had stepped forward.

“I am his son.” Legolas drew himself up and looked down at the dwarfs in an unconscious imitation of his father’s imperious stare. “What is your message?”

The dwarf, if possible, looked even more truculent.

“Tell your king that if the she-elf that stands guard over the prince of Durin does not surrender his body to us, we will take it by force. A fair warning,” he said without any hint of fairness in his voice.

Tauriel. Again, Tauriel. Legolas looked towards Raven Hill. What was she thinking? He frowned at the dwarf.

“I will see to it.”

The dwarfs turned and marched back over the bridge towards Erebor.

“Find me a horse,” Legolas said to the elven captain behind him. “And you and you,” he pointed to two others, “come with me.”

If he could not persuade her to give up the body of her dwarf, he would need help.

But no one moved.

“Elthas? Hothien? Do you hear me?”

“She chose to cast her lot in with the dwarfs,” Hothien said. “Leave her to her fate.”

“She raised her hand to the king,” Elthas said, his voice more bitter than Legolas had ever heard it. “She is a traitor.”

And so word had spread through the ranks of Tauriel’s standoff with Thranduil in the streets of Dale.

“Then so am I,” Legolas said. No one contradicted him.

Caradil had returned with a horse. Wordlessly, Legolas swung onto its back, but before he could urge it forward, Feren grabbed hold of the bridle.

“You cannot leave him again.” Feren said, all deference replaced with anger. “Not like this!”

“I cannot help him.” Legolas said. “Send a messenger to Mirkwood to bring Iothoriel to Dale.”

“He could be dead before she gets here!” Feren clung to the bridle.

“What would you have me do?” Legolas gripped the reins as the horse began to sidle beneath him

“Stay with him!” Feren shouted, furious.

Legolas shook his head, barely trusting himself to speak. “Don’t you understand? I cannot sit and watch him die. Not when it was by me that he was hurt!”

Of all elves, Feren should understand. He had heard the last cold words Legolas had said to his father. With a cruel twist of the reins, he shook Feren from the bridle and kicked the horse into a gallop. Streaming across the bridge, he overtook the dwarfs, who scattered in front of him, shouting curses he did not heed.

As he rode, the words of Feren and Bard sounded like a drumbeat in his ear. _He must have been ambushed. No orc blade could touch him._ No, not unless he was distracted beyond measure, his keen focus pulled away from battle and his own defense with the need to find his son and fear of what may have befallen him. This was what happened when you opened your heart at long last.

He pushed the horse up Raven Hill until it began to stumble and twice fell to its knees. Contrite, he dismounted and made the rest of the climb on foot, leaving the horse behind. At the ruins of the watch tower, he was stopped by another little knot of dwarfs.

“What do you want?” one of them asked belligerently. “We’ve trouble enough with elves.”

“I have come to get your prince for you,” he said. “Let me through.”

The dwarfs stepped aside and Legolas strode through the passages of the tower. When he reached the promontory where the dwarf had been slain, he saw her, standing at the edge of the cliff, long knife in hand, staring into the west. When she heard his approach, she suddenly turned and ran blindly, flinging herself over the body of the dead dwarf.

“I will kill you if you touch him!” she screamed.

He stood over her, watching as she buried her face in the dwarf’s lifeless chest and his heart crashed against his ribcage. She could draw him into treason against his own father while giving her heart to another, and still he loved her. Even now, knowing her love was as beyond his reach as the stars, he could not help himself.

“Tauriel,” he said gently.

She looked up at him and the feral rage in her face melted into piteous supplication.

“They want to bury him,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I cannot let them put him in that mountain. Not where he cannot see the moon, when he loved it so much.”

She dropped her head again onto the dwarf’s chest and began to weep, body-wracking sobs that threatened to tear her apart.

Legolas crouched beside her, eased the knife from her hand and slid it into his belt.

“Come, Tauriel. You must let him go.”

She shook her head, but when he put his hands on her shoulders, she allowed him to raise her to her feet. He put his arms around her and pulled her head onto his shoulder. With a jerk of his chin, he signaled to the dwarfs, who hurried forward and carried their prince away. As he watched and waited until they were out of sight, he did not notice that she had reached down and taken the knife from his belt until she pushed out of his embrace, the point of the knife at the base of her throat.

“Don’t.” He forced the word through a throat paralyzed by horror.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “For everything. For hurting you, most of all.”

“You have not hurt me,” he lied. “Tauriel, give me the knife.”

But she pressed it harder against her flesh.

“I made you betray your father.”

As she spoke, she backed slowly towards the edge of the cliff.

“He needs you!” Desperately, he called to her “The king needs you, Tauriel!”

She shook her head. “I have no king.”

“They have taken him to Dale,” he said. “He is badly wounded. He may be dying. There is no one that can help him.”

“I cannot help him,” she said. “I cannot help anyone.”

“Please. Come back with me and try.”

She shook her head again, took another backwards step.

“Tauriel!” he said sharply, trying a new tactic. “You used to know your duty. You once asked me if we were part of this world and now you would cheat your way out of it because it has hurt you. You are part of this world and you have work to do.”

She stopped and looked at him in bewilderment. Taking advantage of her hesitation, he sprang at her, one arm around her waist, the other hand on the knife. In one motion, he spun her away from the cliff and flung the knife into the open air over the valley.

Angrily, she tore herself away from him and stood, heaving. He held out his hand.

“Come, Tauriel.” It was not a command. It was simply what they both knew she must do. Whether or not she could save the king, neither of them could know, but it was the only thing he could think of, for her and for his father.

She put her hand in his and together, they walked through the watch tower and made their way down the hillside where the horse waited, picking hopefully through the barren rock for something green to eat. Legolas mounted the horse and pulled Tauriel up behind him.

“Hold on,” he told her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *There is an easter egg in this chapter for seriously obsessed Lee Pace fans.


	3. Chapter 3

The sun was almost set and the light failing when they made their way back to Dale. As they rode through the city, the elven soldiers all turned their backs. Legolas felt Tauriel’s hands tremble where she gripped his tunic.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said.

“Why not? I only threatened to kill their king.”

He pulled up before the Great Hall, and she slipped off the horse and stood waiting while he dismounted. There were elven soldiers posted at the entrance to the hall and when Legolas stepped forward, they crossed their spears to bar the way.

“Let me pass.”

“No,” one of them said and after a long beat, added “my lord.”

Legolas made to push past them but they raised their shields and forced him back. In the square, a small crowd of Laketowners began to gather.

“Damn you,” he said. “I have to get to my father!”

“Not with her,” one of the soldiers said.

“She’s come to help him!”

“Our orders are to protect the king,” the soldier said. “She has threatened him once already.”

“Legolas, don’t!” Tauriel cried. “Go without me!”

“Let us through!”

He threw himself at the soldiers but two more came up behind him and grabbed his arms, dragging him back.

“Let me go!” he shouted, twisting wildly in their grip. “Feren! Feren!”

The equerry came running to the door, sword drawn and stopped at sight of Legolas, Tauriel behind him.

His face hard, Feren sheathed his sword and came forward.

“Release him,” he ordered the soldiers.

Legolas jerked his arms from their hands. They stepped back but not away.

“Why did you bring her here?” Feren asked him, motioning towards Tauriel.

“For the king,” Legolas said, heading for the door.

“No.” Feren put a hand flat on Legolas’s chest.

“You will not keep us out.”

“It is not me,” Feren said. “The entire army will tear this building down before they let her in.”

 “Ask the king then,” Legolas said. “Ask him if he will see her or not.”

“I cannot ask the king,” Feren said. “He has not awakened.”

“What?” A cold, dark fear rose inside of him. “Then you must let her see him!”

“Iothoriel has been sent for,” Feren said helplessly.

“It could be too late by then.” Legolas fought the urge to grab Feren by the front of his tunic. “You heard the girl. Tauriel saved—” A quick glance at Tauriel. “She has healed others.”

Tauriel came slowly forward, her head bowed.

“You will be there, Feren,” she said quietly, earnestly, “and his guard. You will watch everything that I do and see that I do him no harm. And when Iothoriel comes, the guard may take me away.”

Feren looked at Tauriel, weighing her words against what he had last seen, her bow raised, her arrow aimed at the king.

“Let her in,” Legolas pleaded.

Feren turned and looked at the soldiers at the door, not in command but as though to ask their approval. Straightening, they returned their spears to attention and stepped aside.

“Go,” Feren said.

A hand on her arm, Legolas propelled Tauriel into the Great Hall. Feren followed in their wake. At the door to the antechamber, Legolas held back the curtain to let Tauriel and Feren pass through.

Inside the room, the woman called Aggie sat by the king’s bed. She had removed his pauldrons, gauntlets and greaves and piled them on the floor like the remains of a defiled monument. In her hand was a damp cloth with which she gently washed the orc blood from Thranduil’s face. In her lap, she cradled the king’s silver crown. As she worked, she sang softly to herself.

“Hush, my baa lamb, do not weep.  
Lay aside your cares and sleep.  
All night I the watch shall keep  
And wake you in the morning.

The sky is draped in velvet night.  
The stars rain down their silver light.  
Your troubles will be set a’right.  
A brand new day is dawning.”

Feren approached her and touched her shoulder. She looked up at him and smiled.

“Forgive an old woman’s folly.” And then shaking her head mournfully, she said “Has the healer come? He is fearsome hurt, the pretty thing.”

“Yes, she is here,” Feren said.

“Then I shall give her way.”

Aggie rose and holding Thranduil’s crown like a ceremonial offering, she crossed the room to Legolas, who lingered just inside the doorway.

“Here, sir.” She held the crown out to him. “I did not like to take it off but I could not but think that it was hurting him, poor lamb.”

Legolas looked down at the intricately worked circle with its milky central stone and the weight of all that it encompassed fell over him like a pall so that he feared to touch it, to acknowledge what its passing from his father’s head to his hands might portend. Not only the burden of loss but that of a terrible responsibility that his father had carried for thousands of years.

The woman lifted it a little higher, as though she thought he had not seen. He could not refuse to take it.

“Thank you for your kindness to him,” he said as he took the circlet. It was warm from her touch and heavy in hand.

Aggie smiled at him and turned back to the others. No one noticed as Legolas slipped from the chamber.

“Now, my lady,” Aggie said to Tauriel. “What do you need?”

Tauriel, who had been transfixed by the sight of the proud king brought so very low, spun round.

“Some hot water,” she said. “And I was told there was a little athelas—kingsfoil, that is.”

“Aye, Master Bard has kept watch o’that. I shall send for him and bring you the water.”

Aggie bustled out and Tauriel took her place at Thranduil’s side.

“My lord?” she said quietly, unwilling to believe that the king whose very name evoked strength and life could have slipped beyond them in this way.

But there was no response.

Reluctantly—for she had never put her hands upon her king—she gently turned his head to the side to see the wound. The woman had cleaned it best she could and Tauriel could see the ragged gash left by the crude orc blade. But what kindled new dread was the dark poison that had begun to spread outward from the wound. Orcs were known to poison their weapons. It was not the same as the poison of the morgul shaft of which she could not bear to think, but deadly in its own way.

Panicked, she looked at Feren and knew by his face that he had seen as well.

“Try,” he said in answer to the fear in her eyes.

The curtain parted again and Bard entered, followed by Aggie.

“You are she that saved my children?” he said to Tauriel. “I owe you more than I can possibly say.”

“You owe me nothing,” she said. “It was the dwarfs that poled the boat through the lake.”

Bard smiled. “My thanks, all the same. And you are wanting this.”

From the pocket of his coat, he pulled the stems of athelas and handed them to her. She rolled them between her fingers. They were beginning to dry and she did not know how much use they would be.

“King Thranduil has been kind to my people,” Bard said. “You shall have everything we can supply to treat him. Scouts have gone out in search of more of this but I fear it does not grow in these rocky places.”

Tauriel nodded and turned to Aggie, who held a bowl of water from which steam rose and a clean cloth over her arm. Tauriel took the bowl and cloth and dropped two of the stems of athelas into it. She handed the rest to Aggie.

“Take this into the hall and steep it in hot water,” she said. “The scent will ease those who suffer. Use the water to cleanse their wounds.”

“What can I do?” Bard asked.

“Stay by,” Tauriel said and looked at Feren. “Both of you. If he stirs, I may need your strength.”

She began to chant quietly to herself as she reached into the bowl and crushed the stems with her fingers. Chanting still, she pressed the bruised athelas against the wound and suddenly, Thranduil cried out, a strangled scream wrenched from his chest. His head twisted away from her and his body seized and arched.

Bard and Feren quickly moved to hold him down. The guards at the door rushed into the room.

“OUT!” Feren shouted at them over the screams, struggling to hold the king’s thrashing legs. The guards backed out in confusion.

Bard had cast himself across Thranduil’s chest. He looked from Tauriel, mouthing words he did not understand, to Feren in alarm.

“Is this—is it always this bad?”

“Not always,” Feren said, forcing down his own fear.

But gradually, the wild contortion of Thranduil’s body lessened and his screams subsided to choking gasps. He jerked reflexively once or twice, a slow shudder ran the length of him and he lay still.

Bard straightened and stood back. Feren took his place and put his hand on the king’s chest. Across from him, Tauriel sat, her hands covering the wound, her eyes closed. She drew a long, quivering breath and looked at Feren.

“He breathes,” Feren said hopefully.

Almost imperceptibly, Tauriel shook her head.

“I cannot reach him,” she whispered. “I cannot heal this hurt. It is beyond me.”

“Will he last until Iothoriel comes?” Feren asked.

“I do not know if even she could save him,” Tauriel said. “The wound is bad but there is something more here. It may be…”

She turned to look over her shoulder, to speak to Legolas but there was no one by the door. She stood.

“I must find the prince,” she said to Feren.

“I will go,” Feren said.

“Let me,” she said. “The guard will not take it well if you leave me alone with the king. Will you stay with him?”

“Of course.”

“Bathe him with the athelas water and keep him warm.”

“How can I help?” Bard stepped forward.

“You have helped enough,” Feren said. “Care now for your own.”

Bard followed Tauriel to the door.

“Tauriel?” Feren called her back.

“Yes?”

“Do you go to find the prince so that he may say his farewell?”

She bowed her head.

“I hope not.”


	4. Chapter 4

He had not gone far. She found him on the other side of the market square, picking through the remains of Thranduil’s tent in the gathering dark. He smiled when he saw her and extended his arm to show her the little leather-bound volume he had found. It fell open on his palm and the parchment leaves fluttered slightly in the chill breeze. In his other hand, he still held his father’s crown.

“Do you see?” he asked her. “Even riding into threat of war ahead of an army, he cannot leave behind his one true love.”

He looked at the open page, the carefully detailed drawings and notes on the culture of orchids in his father’s precise hand and a sharp pain twisted his gut. He snapped the little book closed in his clenched fist.

“Have you come to tell me that my father is dead?”

“No, my lord.” At the look of hope on his face, she quickly said. “But he is not well. You must come.”

“To say goodbye?” He shook his head. “You heard the last words that passed between us.”

She had. Words of sharp division spoken on her behalf.

“He would not have harmed me, Legolas,” she said. “He would never kill one of his own people.”

In the moment, she had been afraid when the king’s sword flashed across her vision. She had pushed him too far and knew him to be an opponent she could never hope to best. But when he began to speak, his words cutting deeper than any blade, she understood. He had been wrong about her feelings. The agony roiling within her breast was proof of that. But so she had been wrong about him. Tauriel had never known loss before. Now it burned in her blood like acid, swirled around her like a black tide and threatened to crush her with its unendurable weight. Her loss she had borne for less than a day. The king had been carrying his for thousands of years. For one brief moment on the body-strewn streets of Dale, the king had laid bare his tormented heart and she had seen. There _was_ love in him—love that was almost terrible to look upon.

“He was wrong,” Legolas said.

“Perhaps so,” Tauriel said, “but he had to weigh the risk and decide its worth. That is his burden.”

Legolas fingered the crown in his hand and thought of the old woman who feared that it had been hurting his father. There was a penalty to kingship he had never guessed.

“There is no amends I can make him now,” Legolas said. “None that he will hear and know.”

“You don’t know that. His body lives but his spirit walks in the land of death. I cannot reach him. He does not hear me, but he may hear one of his own blood. You, Legolas.”

She came close to him and put her hand on his arm.

“Life is too precious,” she said, her eyes large with tears, “to let it slip away without a fight.”

He returned to the hall, Tauriel walking steadily behind him. This time, the soldiers did not stop them. But at the door of the anteroom, he hesitated again. Feren had stripped the king and bathed him and covered him in tattered blankets. His wound he had bound with a broad strip of homespun cloth no whiter than the king’s pale skin. One arm lay outside the blankets, across his chest. A fire roared in the grate and a small lamp burned on the wide windowsill.

Feren stood and bowed to Legolas.

“I will be outside,” he murmured to Tauriel as he left the chamber.

Legolas stood unmoving. He had seen his father still before, for the king was wont to brood, but had never seen him sleep and sleep looked too much like death.

“And that was his only wound?” he asked Tauriel. “The blow to the head?”

“There is a wound that does not show,” she said.

“A wound of my making,” he said bitterly.

“No. It is self-inflicted and festering many hundreds of years. I felt it when I touched him. You must touch him and feel it, too, to understand.”

Gently, she eased the little book and the crown from his hands.

“Go to him,” she said. “Put your hands upon him.”

As though entranced by her words, he walked to the bed and sat by his father’s side. He raised one hand and held it, hovering over Thranduil’s hand.

“Tauriel?” he said, not even knowing what he hoped she might do.

“Call to him,” she said. “He walks in hopelessness and despair. If he believes that is all that awaits him, he will not wake.”

“What do I say?”

“Pity him. Forgive him, if you can.”

He turned to look at her in surprise.

“For what?”

But she only bowed her head and backed out of the room. On the other side of the curtain, she sighed and let her shoulders fall as her grief returned and draped itself over her like a dark mantle. She did not resist when Feren took the king’s crown from her hand and the soldiers grasped her arms and led her away. Her lord did not see.

Left alone with only the hiss and pop of the fire behind him, Legolas turned back to his father. Pity him? How did you pity a king? He felt pity only for himself.

Drawing a long, slow breath, Legolas laid his hand upon his father’s.

***

He was pulled into darkness as though some unseen spirit had reached out of the void and seized him by the wrist. He felt cold blackness whisk by as the force drew him onward and struggled to breathe in a blankness where there was no air. Panicked, he pulled against whatever held him and fought to go back. But a voice of great gentleness said to him “Be at ease, little leaf. You are safe here.”

Oddly comforted, he felt himself slowly falling until his feet made contact with a firm ground he could not see. All around him was black except in the very distance, a figure of white light moved away from him with a familiar, stately grace.

“Father!” he called.

The figure halted its slow progress but did not turn.

“Father, please!”

If his father heard, it made no difference. He began to walk again, away from his son.

_Pity him. Forgive him._

“I forgive you!” Legolas shouted desperately into the dark, not sure what he was forgiving.

His father only inclined his head slightly and continued to walk. Beyond him, two great gates appeared and loomed into the dark.

“Father, _NO_!”

Legolas began to run and stumbled, fighting for a purchase on the strange, dark, uneven road beneath him. He knew now where he was, where they were and where those gates led.

“Don’t go! Father! Don’t!”

Thranduil turned.

“Legolas!” His deep, resonant voice rumbled across the distance between them. “Go back!”

“Not without you!” Legolas shouted.

Thranduil cast over his shoulder to see that the gates had begun their slow swing outward.

“Leave this place at once!” he ordered, but Legolas had closed the ground between them and stood before him.

“Not without you,” Legolas repeated.

He stretched out his hand and Thranduil took a panicked step backwards.

“You must not touch me!” The king looked again at the gates and back at his son. “Go quickly! When the gates open, it will be too late!”

Legolas lunged for his father and grabbed both of his hands and all around them, the dark exploded into light.


	5. Chapter 5

Legolas jolted upright, gasping. The room was silent and the fire had burned low in the grate. On the bed, his father lay much as before, still and white. Had it been fancy then? Or a dream? Or had he simply failed?

“Father?”

Thranduil’s eyes were closed but his head turned fitfully on the pillow.

“Can you hear me?”

The voice came to Thranduil muffled, as though he was underwater. He struggled to swim up, to break the surface, but he was so very tired. Weariness had seeped through his veins until it ached in every part of him, the weight of it like unwanted armor. If he let it, it would drag him under, but there was something in that voice that pulled at him, held him and would not let him go.

The lids of his eyes were like broken shutters and took what little strength he had to open and at first, his eyes refused to focus. Gradually, the soft blur of light and dark sorted itself into shapes and depth, and before him, the face of his son, not as he had seen it last—hard with anger—but shot through with the strain of fear. Somewhere, behind the walls of his mind, was a retreating memory of a long, dark road.

“What is this place?” he asked, his voice hoarse, his throat raw as though he had been screaming.

“We are in Dale, Father,” Legolas said and his voice, too, was hoarse.

Dale. There had been a battle in Dale. Was that it? He stared unseeingly at the shadowed ceiling and grasped at memory.

“I had a vision,” he said, “of a dark place.”

“You have been ill,” Legolas said. “You were wounded.”

Thranduil looked at his son.

“You were there,” he breathed, “in the darkness.”

Legolas nodded. “Yes.”

Another concentrated, labored intake of air.

“Why did you bring me back?”

Stunned by the reproach in his father’s voice, Legolas could find no words to respond. There had been no thought, only forward movement, only the drive to keep his father in the world. Giving voice to that visceral imperative was impossible.

“Because...you are needed,” he said helplessly. "Your people need you."

The furrow between Thranduil’s brows deepened.

“I have failed them.”

“No,” Legolas said, thinking of the loyalty—the dangerously fierce loyalty of the army from the moment their king had been found on the battlefield.

“I brought them here to die,” Thranduil said “in pursuit of my own selfish purpose.”

“You brought aid to Laketown,” Legolas said. “You knew of what they would face when the dragon awoke.”

“I came for what the dwarfs had withheld from me. You cannot make a virtue of that, no matter how you try.”

“But when the orcs attacked—”

“What choice did I have? Stand and fight or be slaughtered.”

Thranduil closed his eyes, to shut out the sight of his son’s bewildered denial.

“The battle is won, Father,” Legolas said. “The evil that you feared has been defeated.”

Thranduil shook his head and the pain reached around his skull like the claws of a great beast. He drew a sharp breath.

“It has crawled away to hide,” he said, “but it will return and I am weary of the fray and sick with the loss. Over and again, I have watched them die. Too many of them.”

The darkness was comfortingly near. His grasp on this world was tenuous. The gates stood open, waiting for him. He had only to let himself fall. But he could not go, not just yet.

He opened his eyes and turned to his son. Legolas sat bowed, elbows on knees, his head bent over his clasped hands.

“You,” Thranduil said, “I have failed above all others.”

Legolas looked up in surprise.

“Never,” he said, forgetting his anger on Raven Hill.

“Yes,” his father said. “I have failed you every day since she died.”

Legolas straightened slowly as a cool shadow passed between them. All of his life, he had wanted to hear his father speak of his mother and now he did not know if he could bear it.

“Father, don’t,” he said. “You need rest. I’ll have Feren bring—”

“No, not yet. Let me tell you while I can, while my tongue is loosed at last. Your mother—” The king’s voice broke and he drew a shuddering breath. “I kept her memory from you and told myself it was to protect you from the pain but I was hoarding it for myself. I betrayed her in memory by loving my loss more than I loved you.”

Legolas bent again, his forehead on his fists. This was not what he had wanted to know. He did not want to wander the tangled paths of his father’s heart. He wanted what he had no memory of, the soft assurance of his mother’s love, not the cold confirmation that he had spent his life throwing himself against a wall built to deliberately keep him out.

“Why do you tell me this now?” he said without looking up.

“Because I cannot tell her.”

The words hung between them as Thranduil traveled in memory, always behind and never quite catching her, a flicker of her skirts, a wisp of bright hair forever in the distance, out of his reach.

“When you stood against me in the streets out there…” The king made a weak gesture towards the window. “…I saw in your face what I had done to you. And the words that you threw at me—that you believed I could have hurt Tauriel or ever dreamed I would touch you in anger. To know what you believed me capable of was the proof of my failure.”

Legolas opened his fists and covered his face with his hands, as though he could hide childlike away from Thranduil’s words, as he remembered the sickening disgust that had turned to anger as cold and hard as he believed his father's heart to be in that moment.

In the heavy silence, Thranduil marshalled what strength was left to him and drew from the darkest vaults of his heart the truth he had kept locked away, even from himself.

“I have been afraid to love you,” he said, each word an act of will against pain, exhaustion and a lifetime of reserve, “because I have been afraid to lose you. In the end, I have lost you…just the same.”

Something in the labored descent of Thranduil’s voice pulled at Legolas like an invisible cord. He sat up, away from the shield of his hands. His father looked past him into the darkness, his eyes fever-bright and ringed in shadow. _There is a wound that does not show_. But his father had torn open the scars and let it bleed anew.

“You have not lost me,” Legolas said. “I am here.”

Thranduil waited for the slow focus of his vision to resolve again into the face of his son; desperation tormenting features that had sometimes been too hard for him to look on, reminding him so much of her.

“Yes,” he said and the ghost of a smile haunted the corners of his mouth. “You have always been a dutiful son. And now I ask you to obey me one last time. Go from this place. Leave me and do not come back.”

“What? Why?”

Thranduil turned away from the hurt in his son’s eyes. If he had stayed in this world these thousands of years, bearing the unbearable, it had been out of a sense of duty. If he had failed in that, there was no longer any reason to stay. In his mind, he did not see the loyalty of his soldiers, the patient, quiet devotion of his people and never the truth behind the unwavering obedience of his son. He saw only the bodies of once-immortal elves in the streets, and the heartbreak of those that waited in Mirkwood for the ones they loved who would never return. Most damning of all, the image of Legolas walking away from him. He saw only failure.

“I do not want you to see me die,” he said, the words falling from his lips like stones.

“You aren’t going to die,” Legolas said. “You speak out of illness, but you will recover.”

Thranduil shook his head and there flashed across his memory another ghost, long buried beneath years of newer grief, another death, another loss too great to speak of.

“You do not love me,” he said, “but I do not wish the memory of my death on you, for all of that.”

“That isn’t true.” Legolas’s voice was rough with an anger that surprised him. “I have always loved you. Every order I obeyed, that was not duty. That was love!”

Thranduil turned to his son, this time in entreaty.

 “Then obey me now,” he begged. “Go, Legolas.”

“No!” Legolas leaned forward and clutched his father’s arm as though he could physically hold Thranduil back from death. “I brought you back. I will only come after you again!”

“I am too tired to fight you.” The pain in Thranduil’s head washed away the unanswerable challenge of his son's words. The darkness was waiting to take him under, away from his failure and his grief. “Let me go.”

But he had not trained his son to give up.

“I will stay here, then and watch you die,” Legolas said furiously. “I will watch you give up, and that is the memory of you I will carry with me. Is that what you want?”

And to this, too, he could make no answer. Thranduil closed his eyes; one tear slid down the side of his face and disappeared into his hair. He reached for darkness.

“I came back,” Legolas tried again, his fury burning into ash, “after the battle. I was going to leave but I came back because of you.”

But there was no response. Thranduil was still, his face seemed carved from ice. Legolas bent and laid his head on the king’s chest, listening again for a heartbeat. Faint and faraway it sounded, the time between each pulse lengthening into an eternity.

“I am here now,” Legolas whispered, the words shredded with hopeless need, grasping at a last chance. “She is gone, but I am here. Love me now.”

His whispers dissolved in the dark quiet of the chamber and he could not know if he had been heard, yet he held on desperately, waiting, listening. He felt something brush his shoulder and long fingers tangled in his hair as a hand feebly reached up to rest upon his head.

“I obey,” his father breathed.


	6. Chapter 6

All through the night and into the light of the next morning, Legolas stayed with his head on his father’s chest, feeling the slow swell and rise and listening to the beat of Thranduil’s heart as though it regulated time, loath to move for fear that time would stop.

“My lord?” Feren’s voice called. “Iothoriel is come.”

Legolas sat up and turned to the equerry, one hand still on his father’s arm.

“So quickly?” he asked in a muddle of weariness and strain. “How many days have passed?”

“Only the night,” Feren said. “Iothoriel set out from Mirkwood before the messenger was ever sent. She had a presentiment she would be needed.”

Feren stepped back to let Iothoriel into the chamber. Tall and golden-haired, she had come to Mirkwood with King Oropher, when Thranduil was a prince and Mirkwood was Greenwood the Great and had brought with her a great knowledge of healing. She was followed by two elf maids who carried boxes and baskets of herbs and medicines.

At sight of the king, Iothoriel stripped off her traveling cloak and gloves and sank to her knees by his side. With deft fingers, she unwound the bandage around Thranduil’s head.

“Who applied the athelas?” she asked

“Tauriel,” Legolas said, stepping back but this time not away from his father.

“The child has a gifted touch.”

Iothoriel opened a small box one of her attendants had placed on the floor beside her, withdrew a pot of salve and dipped her fingers into it. When she touched Thranduil’s wound, his eyes suddenly opened and he struggled to sit up.

“Legolas!” he gasped. “Where is he?”

“Do not fret, my lord." Iothoriel placed her hand on the king's chest. “He is here.”

But Thranduil resisted her restraining hand.

“Speak to him,” Iothoriel said to Legolas. “Let him know that all is well.”

Legolas stepped forward, into Thranduil’s line of vision.

“I am here, Father,” he said. “You see, I did not go.”

Iothoriel thought it an odd choice of words, but it seemed to have the desired effect. Thranduil lay still and his frantic breathing quieted. His eyes, though, remained fixed on his son, his brows drawn in soft confusion.

“It is morning?” the king asked.

“Yes, Father.”

Iothoriel rose and Legolas knelt in her place, his hand on the edge of the bed. Something he could not define moved in him at the expression on Thranduil’s face.

“You stayed?”

Legolas had never heard his father’s voice so uncertain. He felt Thranduil’s fingers fumble along his hand and he understood. His father, always so strong and seemingly in control, had never needed him, not in the way he needed him now. Legolas took the long, powerful hand into his and held it firmly.

“And so did you.”

In that moment, Thranduil felt the great burden of his life shift in the warm pressure of his son’s hand and an ease he had not known in thousands of years.

“It is well, then?”

“Yes, Father.”

“No more talking for now.”  Iothoriel had come round the other side of the bed with a small goblet of wine warmed over the fire. “Help me get some of this into him.”

Still holding his father’s hand, Legolas slipped his other arm behind Thranduil’s shoulders and helped him sit up while Iothoriel held the goblet to his lips and coaxed and cajoled until he had swallowed most of it. The king lay back on the bed as if the effort had drained him and soon, his grip slackened in Legolas’s hand.

“Come.” Iothoriel put her hands on Legolas’s shoulders and brought him to his feet. “I know him of old. He will not take the rest he needs unless he has no choice.”

“You’ve drugged him!?” Legolas looked at the unconscious king and back at Iothoriel in shocked admiration.

“Yes.” Iothoriel’s eyes moved shrewdly over Legolas’s face and his battle-worn clothing. “Must I do the same to you or will you be sensible? When is the last time you’ve eaten?”

Legolas could not remember.

“I see,” Iothoriel said. “We have brought provisions. Go and find Anethon and get something to eat and then find a quiet place where you can rest.”

Legolas looked past her to where her attendants were placing a fresh dressing on the king’s wound.

“Will he recover?” he asked.

“This poison is deadly.” Iothoriel frowned. “He is fortunate to have survived. The effects will linger, but yes, he will be well in time.”

Briefly, quietly, Legolas told her of the darkness and the voice that had spoken to him.

“It is a rare grace that was granted you.” She turned to look at the sleeping king. “He is worn in body and spirit. How tired he must be, how ready to lay aside the weight he carries. And yet, he heeded your call. That is a gift, Legolas.” She put her hands over his and smiled. “And now, heed me, my lord. Go. See to yourself. He is well taken care of. You may stop worrying.”

He went but he did not go to Anethon. He searched instead for Tauriel. She was not in the hall and not in the square, where the soldiers were unloading and organizing the provisions Iothoriel had brought. They pointedly ignored Legolas when he strode by.

 He found Feren, who was overseeing the grim task of accounting for the dead.

“Where is Tauriel?” he asked and noted that the soldiers who had cut him stopped and glared. “Have you seen her?”

“She is under guard, my lord,” Feren said cautiously.

“You must release her.”

Silently, Feren took Legolas by the arm and drew him off to a side street.

“I have no authority to release her,” he said. “There were too many witnesses to her crime. Until the king decides her fate, there is nothing any of us can do. She is safe where she is, until the king recovers.”

“Safe? Under guard?”

“Yes, my lord. For her own sake as much as anything. I chose the guards myself, soldiers I trust.”

“If you won’t release her, I will.”

Legolas made to move but Feren held firm.

“My lord, no! Think! The soldiers are already set against you for standing with her against the king. If you release her, do not think your position will protect you—or her.”

Feren was tired, sick at heart from retrieving the bodies of elves he had counted as friends, in fear for the life of his king and worried for the captain he had once respected. What he did not need was to have to physically restrain his prince from further treason.

“She will be treated well,” he said. “I promise you.”

Legolas let his shoulders sag.

“Your word, Feren,” he murmured.

“You have it, my lord.”

He left Feren then, took some food and a bottle of wine and climbed up onto a deserted rampart overlooking the valley. In the distance loomed the Lonely Mountain, where the dwarfs were burying their king. So much had been lost. His king would live but the loss of the elven soldiers would haunt his father, he knew. Thranduil would withdraw to Mirkwood again and close borders around the remnants of his people.

A sharp wind was blowing across the valley, and it carried on it a sense of restlessness, of movement that swept through his heart as though it would take him with it. Legolas moved into the lee of a broad battlement, out of the wind and tried to set his mind on rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have gone back and puttied up a small plot-hole in chapter two to explain that there was a healer who traveled with the army but who was killed in the battle.


	7. Chapter 7

In three days, Thranduil was sitting up in the more substantial bed that had been brought into the chamber, refusing to drink anything Iothoriel offered him unless she tasted it first and shouting orders at Feren and any other elf within call of his voice. Legolas heard him from the square and a smile quirked a corner of his lips at the return of that familiar, resounding note of command, and as quickly, his smile flickered out at the thought of what was in his heart and how difficult it was going to be to tell his father.

Inside the main room of the Great Hall, Iothoriel’s attendants treated the injured and wounded of the Laketown survivors while those who were able had begun the slow work of rebuilding Dale.

“…find out how many wagons we have and how many we will need,” Thranduil’s voice boomed, following a harried Feren into the hall. “And bring me ink and something to write on!”

Feren paused on his way through the hall and bowed to Legolas.

“He has been asking for you, my lord.”

“Has he said yet what he means to do about Tauriel?”

“No, my lord, and I did not broach the subject with him. He will decide in his own time.”

But Legolas knew that his father’s sense of time followed a leisurely pace when he chose. He had heeded Feren’s advice and had not seen Tauriel for himself since she had left him with Thranduil days ago, and he was anxious lest she should think he had abandoned her, after all that she had done. He worried, too, to think of her alone with her pain. Too well he knew how that private torture could warp the strongest nature and could not bear the thought of everything that he had loved about her, all that was bright and vibrant, swept away by loss and only a shell of what she had been left behind.

But there was little he could do to help her. Even if he could persuade his father to release her, there was a cage from which she would never be free. And there was yet his own cage to be opened.

He entered the antechamber unnoticed at first, his father, wrapped in a wine-colored robe, absorbed in a torn map spread across his lap. Iothoriel busied herself over her medicines under the window, her back to the door.

“You asked to see me, Father?”

Thranduil looked up, the sound of his son’s voice drawing him as it never had before and found it suddenly hard to meet that level, thoughtful gaze, remembering how much he had laid bare beneath it in the extreme of his despair and pain. Wounds had been opened that could not now be covered up and ignored.

Nevertheless, he tried.

“I shall be fit to ride in two days’ time,” Thranduil said, cloaking his voice in its old brisk authority.

“Fit to ride in a litter, you mean to say,” Iothoriel cut him off. At sight of the obdurate scowl he threw her, she said “Of course, my lord, if you insist on horseback, we can rest here for another fortnight.”

They matched stares for a moment, but Thranduil’s indignation battered impotently against the sturdy wall of Iothoriel’s placid resolve.

“Very well,” he said, relenting with poor grace. “I will be fit to ride _in a litter_ in two days’ time. I am sending scouts ahead to deal with any orcs that may be lingering on the road. You will lead them.” Thranduil turned the map so that Legolas could see and pointed to a section of it. “My main concerns are here at the—”

“No, Father.”

Thranduil broke off and looked at his son. Legolas had listened to his father outline the return to Mirkwood with a mounting sense of agitation, unable to remain silent.

“I’m sorry,” he said “There is something I must say first.”

Thranduil straightened and raised one hand. “Iothoriel,” he said quietly.

Without a word, she bowed and left the chamber. When she was gone, Thranduil seemed to shrink somehow, not sitting quite as tall as he had been. He busied himself for a moment, rolling the map and carefully tying its bindings, as though putting away the vain hope that everything that had passed between him and his son could be ignored and everything go on as it had done, that painful things could be left unsaid. He let out his breath and raised his eyes to Legolas and his face wore resignation and the more unfamiliar garb of submission.

“Go on,” he said.

Legolas lifted his chin and plunged ahead in a rush of words.

“I cannot go back. I have lost the respect of the soldiers. I cannot lead them. They would not follow me now.”

“Respect can be earned again,” Thranduil said but without conviction for he knew already what Legolas wanted. “Do you believe this?”

“Of course,” Legolas said. “I do not know that I want to try. I want—”

How could he articulate what he did not even know? He shook his head and turned away from the look of puzzled sorrow in the eyes of a king whom he had never known to be less than sure.

“I want to see something of the world,” he finished helplessly.

The true meaning of his words swelled into the silence that echoed in the room. Thranduil felt as though he had caught an anticipated blow to chest, no less bruising for knowing it was coming.

“Where will you go?” he said when he could breathe again, the softness of his voice taking them both by surprise.

“I don’t know,” Legolas admitted. He hadn’t thought that far. All he could think was that he would like to see a fire moon.

He watched his father turning the rolled map thoughtfully in his hands. _I love you,_ Legolas thought. _I want to please you, but I cannot live the way you do._

Thranduil sighed.

“I came here,” he said, laying aside the map, “to retrieve the one thing of your mother’s that I thought I had left to me, but I had lost sight of the fact that I already had that which she had loved more than anything.” He looked up at Legolas. “I had her son.”

Legolas held his breath, remembering the long night of painful, unwelcome revelations.

“And now I must pay the forfeit of that blindness,” Thranduil said, his voice thick with regret. “Your mother loved you, Legolas. More than her own life.”

His face contracted with the memory that was still like a fresh knife wound and he forced his way through it to say what had to be said at last.

“The evil that she died fighting will rise again. I tried to protect you and all of our people by shutting out the world, but I know now that illusion of safety will not last. The darkness that infects Mirkwood will spread to all corners of Middle Earth if it is not stopped. If you seek a purpose, then go into the north, find the Dunedain. Among them is a young man who goes now by the name of Strider. His real name you will learn; his destiny may direct your path.”

Legolas only half heard his father’s words but fully heard the defeat in his voice and he went and knelt by Thranduil’s bed and lowered his head.

“If you wish it, I will come back with you,” he said in desperate contrition. “I will do whatever you bid me.”

Thranduil looked at the bent head, the hair a shade of gold that he followed in dream every night and had to swallow hard the desire to order his son to stay.

“Yes,” he said. “You told me that your obedience was your love, but I cannot use it to bind you to me any longer. Go into the world, Legolas. Find your place in it. You will always know where to find me.”

Legolas raised his head and in his eyes was a strange mixture of regret and relief. Thranduil smiled.

“Father, I—”

“Begging your pardon, my lord.” Thranduil looked up to see a small woman in a very odd hat shuffle into the room, a wooden bowl in her hands. “But the beautiful lady asked me to bring this to you. She says it is good broth—which it is; I made it myself—and you are not to ask me to taste it for you.”

Legolas got to his feet, grateful for Aggie’s presence and yet uncertain how to say goodbye after thousands of years. Thranduil watched him, knowing what held him back and letting the moments slide by until finally he relented.

“Let me hear from you,” he said, opening the way, “when you can.”

Legolas bowed his head and turned to go. But at the doorway, he stopped and turned back.

“I need to ask what you mean to do about Tauriel.”

“Tauriel?” The king had given her no thought and now realized he had not seen her since he had regained consciousness.

“She is held under guard, on charge of treason,” Legolas said.

He remembered then, her bow drawn, arrow nocked and pointed at him, her cold fury, her cutting words and her foolish bravery.

“I am worried for her,” Legolas said. “The army has turned against her. But she only came back to help you. She could have run away and saved herself.”

“And the dwarf?”

“Has been killed.”

Thranduil read the dull, resigned ache in Legolas’s voice. She had loved another and now her heart was in pieces, yet his son would love her still and bear a different kind of pain. It was what he had warned her of. Do not let him love you if you cannot love him back. But it had been in vain. The heart led where it chose, even into its own destruction.

“I will see to it,” Thranduil said. “Set your mind at ease on her behalf and fear not.”

“Thank you, Father.”

Thranduil placed one hand over his heart and extended it towards his son. Legolas bowed his head, touched his own chest and disappeared through the curtained door without another word.

When he had gone, Thranduil felt as though he had been holding himself together by force of will and if he gave way now, he would shatter into a thousand pieces, and he could not do that before this little woman.

Aggie settled onto a stool next to the bed and prepared to feed the rare and beautiful creature that had fallen so unexpectedly into her world.

“So that is your son, is it?” she asked conversationally.

“Yes,” Thranduil said.

Aggie looked to the doorway as though Legolas still stood there and then back to the elvenking with a critical eye.

“He must favor his mother,” she said.

Thranduil looked unseeingly past her.

“Very much,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have stayed with the movieverse's timeline regarding Aragorn's age and also with the notion that Thranduil has a bit of second sight here.
> 
> Stay with me! We're not quite done!


	8. Chapter 8

She was taken into the presence of the king like the prisoner she was, hands bound in front of her, head bowed. The two soldiers who escorted her were members of her own company, her former subordinates. They did not look at or speak to her, even when she begged them to know how many of their number had been lost. Brought before the king, she fell silent. She dare not look at him without his leave, and so she kept her eyes on the floor and heard him before she saw him. He sounded as of old: imperious, impatient, expecting to be obeyed.

“Untie her hands and leave us,” he ordered. “Now.”

One of the soldiers stepped in front of her, pulled a knife from his sheath and slashed downward between her hands, cutting the ropes that bound her.

“Edanen, please,” she whispered.

But he sheathed his knife, did a sharp about-face, bowed to the king and left with his companion.

She stood waiting, uncertain what to expect. In spite of his legendary temper, the king was known to be fair, known to give second chances. Had he not already offered her one by sending his son to bring her back when she had left Mirkwood in pursuit of the dwarfs? But there were no second chances where treason such as she had committed was concerned. The best she could hope for was that her banishment would stand.

“Come!” the king snapped.

Startled, Tauriel did as she was ordered. The king watched her step forward, the effort to hide her fear a visible strain. He understood fear and had used the fear of others to his advantage. But there was no advantage to be had here. There was only sadness.

“Sit here,” he said, motioning to the stool beside him.

She obeyed, her eyes still cast down.

“Look at me,” he said.

She raised her head, perhaps a shade higher than need be. She had an innate pride and sense of self that had always amused him. It was why he had promoted her above elves many hundreds of years her senior. He might have smiled at her then, had it not been for what he saw in her eyes when she met his gaze.

“They tell me that the dwarf…” He struggled to remember the name of Oakenshield’s nephew. “…Kili has been killed.”

The king’s voice was markedly softer, but she had been wooed by that gentle tone before only to be met with hardness. She said nothing and steeled herself for the shaft that he would drive through her open wound in just retaliation for her accusation of his heartlessness.

“I am sorry,” the king said.

Those three words, that kindness was more than she could bear. The dam of her resolve broke and grief flooded through her. She covered her face with her hands and wept.

“I am sorry,” Thranduil said again, “because I know how you will suffer and because you are so young, the years will stretch before you in an eternity of sorrow. It is a punishment I would wish on no one and a sentence I would gladly commute if I could.”

She raised her head, her face tear-wet and twisted in pain.

“Why must it hurt so?”

“Because loss is the secret, terrible penalty of love," he said in the weight of his own knowledge.

“Then I wish I had never loved!” she said savagely.

“Do you?” Thranduil regarded her with pity. “Do you wish that you had never known him?”

She turned away from the king but she could not turn away from the truth his words called up. The improbable little dwarf whose dark eyes lit up with mischief and delight, oh she wanted him so! Would forever remember his easy smile, the feel of his hand in hers, and never stop longing for him. To have never known him was beyond her ability to conceive.

“Can it never be healed, this hurt?” she murmured.

“It can be turned to a better purpose,” Thranduil said.

She looked back at him then and it seemed that she saw his grief as a visible shroud and the knowledge that he had carried the pain she now struggled to absorb for nearly three thousand years struck her nearly senseless with awe. Had not only carried it but carried on and served tirelessly a whole people who had no claim of blood or kinship on him.

“What will you do now?” he asked her.

“Do?” she repeated dumbly. “Do you mean I am free? You release me?”

“Yes. I owe you that much. You showed great courage in coming back to help me. But then, I have always admired your courage.”

Her mind reeled as though all support had been stripped away and she felt she might fall into space. Do? What was there to do? Inside the breast of her tunic, where the guards had not searched, she carried a flat, oval stone on which was carved a dwarven runic.

“There is a task,” she said slowly, as though fearful to commit herself aloud, “that I need to undertake.”

“And what is that?”

She closed her eyes and drew a determined breath.

“To travel to the Blue Mountains, to tell his mother how bravely he died. She deserves to know.”

And to return to her the flat stone, the hopeless little charm that had not worked on her reckless boy.

Thranduil nodded his approval.

“And then? What will you do then?”

She did not know. “Then” stretched out in her mind, a blank expanse of empty days.

“Come back to Mirkwood,” the king said.

She looked at him in surprise.

“I cannot reinstate your command,” he said. “And it is likely you would find life among the rank-and-file soldiers uncomfortable, all things considered. But there is other work for you to do. Iothoriel tells me that you show skill in healing. Indeed, I am the example of that skill.”

“That was not me, my lord.”

He held up his hand to silence her.

“Iothoriel has lost her apprentice in this war. Come and serve her, learn from her. You will be needed in time. And being needed, you may find, can be of some comfort.”

Tauriel sat looking at her hands, hands that had been trained to fight and to kill. She had no taste now for war or its aftermath. But perhaps there was purpose in healing, in saving someone else from the grief she bore.

“You do not have to decide now,” the king said. “Go. Complete your task. I lift your banishment. A place will be waiting for you, should you desire it.”

Her mind reeling as new thoughts shifted into place, she rose and bowed to him. When she bowed, she felt the shift of another small keepsake that she had tucked into her tunic.

“My lord,” she said. “There is something else I need to return.”

She reached inside her tunic and withdrew the small leather bound volume on orchids that the guards had not thought worthy to take from her.

Thranduil recognized it immediately and was not quick enough to disguise the audible gasp that escaped him.

“My lord Legolas found this in the ruins of your tent,” Tauriel said, holding the little book towards the king.

He did not reach to take it. Instead, he said “Did Legolas read it?”

“No, my lord.”

Thranduil’s eyes shifted from the book to Tauriel’s face.

“Did you?”

But he knew before she could answer. It was in a certain sad tenderness in her eyes. In the dark hours of her imprisonment, seeking distraction, she had found something unexpected, and the king’s private sorrow had kept grim watch alongside her own. She had learned how wrong she had been about him.

She nodded.

Thranduil’s hands clutched reflexively at the silken sheet that covered him, as though to keep himself from hiding his face, so suddenly and completely exposed did he feel.

“Perhaps—” Tauriel started hesitantly, uncertain how far she might go. “Perhaps Legolas should read it.”

His instinct was to snatch it from her hand, instinct borne out of centuries of hiding his true self behind the coldness of duty and inside the pages of little books. Flawed instinct that had nearly cost him everything.

“Give it to him,” he said and this time, he did bend and did put his face in his hands. He did not see her leave and did not see Iothoriel enter but felt her hand upon his brow, cool and soft.

“My lord, you will be ill again if you go on like this,” she said. “Whatever else you think you need to do can wait.”

He leaned back against the pillows and closed his eyes, less in obedience to Iothoriel than in utter exhaustion.

“My lord?” Feren came into the chamber. “Gandalf the Gray wishes to see you.”

“No,” Iothoriel snapped. “You have had enough visitors.”

“You will find this one difficult to dissuade,” Thranduil said with a sigh. He pushed himself upright. “Let him in.”

The wizard entered and bowed to Iothoriel as she passed him, glaring.

“My lady,” he said.

“I will be back in a moment,” she said warningly. “Do not tax him.”

Gandalf chuckled to himself.

“Only a fool would disobey, but I will not keep you long, my lord. I am pleased to see you are better. We feared for you when you could not be found on the battlefield.”

Thranduil was in no mood for these pleasantries.

“What is it you have come to tell me?”

“You will have heard that Thorin Oakenshield is dead.”

Thranduil nodded, remembering the fierce, stubborn dwarf who had stood against him.

“I am sorry for his people. He would have made a good king to them.”

“His funeral was held today,” Gandalf said, “and that of his nephews. Bard of Laketown returned the Arkenstone and it was buried with Thorin.”

“That is fitting,” Thranduil said dully. “The Heart of the Mountain belongs with its king.”

Gandalf crossed the room and looked out the frosted window onto the square.

“I am surprised to see your son leaving you so soon after you have been wounded,” he said.

“Are you, Mithrandir?” Thranduil cocked his head. “Is it not what is also in your mind?”

Gandalf turned from the window and regarded the king.

“You sent him north, to the Dunedain?”

Thranduil nodded.

“Strider is not yet ready to take up that responsibility.”

“No,” Thranduil said, “but when he is, he will need help. I am no longer fit for quests and battles. I have strength left only to protect my own, but I send my son into this world you hold so dear.” He bent upon Gandalf a look of dark gravity. “Have I done well, Mithrandir?”

Gandalf bowed.

“Excellent well, my lord.”

For a rare moment, the wizard and the elf king were in accord.

“There is one more who would like to see you,” Gandalf said, smiling. “If it is your wish.”

Thranduil nodded wearily, knowing it was little use to protest. With his staff, Gandalf pulled back the curtain and the halfling, Bilbo Baggins shuffled self-consciously into the room. He was dressed for travel, with a heavy rucksack strapped across his back. Before him, he carried a small wooden chest worked round with iron strappings, a chest Thranduil knew well and his heart surged within him at sight of it.

“I have brought you this, great king,” Bilbo said, “in the name of the dwarfs of Erebor and in some recompense for my—er—shall we say past misdeeds?”

The hobbit gave the king an uncertain smile but Thranduil could do no more than whisper “You have my thanks, my grateful thanks.”

Bilbo set the chest in the king's lap and stepped back. Thranduil sat with his hand hovering over it as though it was a mirage.

“And now we shall leave you, my lord,” Gandalf said. “We have a long journey ahead of us. Bilbo?”

But Thranduil hardly heard him and did not notice when they left, so entirely was he taken with the box in front of him. He undid the catch and placing a hand on either side, lifted the lid, fearing lest it was another trick.

Inside, resting on a bed of smaller stones, it lay. A necklace of gems so clear, they took up the soft light of the chamber and made much of it, sparking into dazzling life. They were set into a silver necklace of great delicacy and beauty, the central pendant suggesting a heart that surrounded a silver orchid, her favorite flower.

He lifted the necklace from the box and held it up in front of him. The heavy links draped across and fell through his long fingers. He closed his eyes and in memory he saw her, her long white throat and her smooth breast and he held the necklace out to see how it would lay against her skin.

When Iothoriel returned, she found the box on the floor surrounded by a shower of glittering white stones and the king doubled over in his bed. With great effort only could she prevail on him to lie down and let her make him comfortable. But by no means was she able to pry from his grasp the silver necklace that had tangled around his fingers.

And so she drew the sheets over him and went and positioned herself on the other side of the curtain in front of his door. She let no one else near him for the rest of the day.

***

Tauriel walked out of the Great Hall into a freedom that was an illusion. Part of her, she knew, would always remain captive. But she held onto the hope offered her by her king that she might find purpose yet, and at that moment, her purpose was before her.

Legolas was in the square, strapping provisions onto the saddle of his horse in preparation for his journey. He started when he saw her.

“He cannot have let you go,” he said in disbelief.

“He has,” she said.

“But you are banished, still?”

“No, even that he has lifted.” She explained to him the commutation of her sentence and the king’s offer.

“And what will you do?” he asked her. “Will you go back?”

“I don’t know.”

He looked at her and even though he read in her eyes the blight of his hopes, he could not help but make one last reach for her.

“Come with me,” he said and he told himself it was for her sake more than for his, to get her away from her sorrow and into a world where she might find some escape.

“Come with you?” she asked. “Aren’t you going back to Mirkwood?”

He shook his head.

“I ride into the north, in search of the Dunedain—” He looked past her, into the distance. “—And to find some purpose.”

She smiled to hear this refrain of his father’s advice to her, but she thought of the lonely king as she had last seen him, his head in his hands.

“You will be missed,” she said. “The king will miss you.”

“Perhaps,” Legolas said, but this was dangerous ground he was not prepared to tread with her.

“He asked me to give you this.”

She took his hand and in it placed the little book of notes on orchids. He looked at it and a wry smile played across his lips.

“What am I to do with this? I am no botanist.”

“Look at it, Legolas,” she said, curling his fingers over the book. “Read the last pages.”

Puzzled but wanting to do as she asked, he opened the book and flicked through it to see what he had seen before. Drawings of orchids and lines of careful notes, pages and pages of them. Until he reached the last ten leaves or so and there the drawings were different. They were of him.

Meticulous studies, like the orchids, numerous drawings of his face: in profile, looking straight out of the page, eyes cast down; sketches of his hands on his bow, of him running,  kneeling, standing, in his service tunic and in court dress. What the drawings lacked in tenderness, they made up for in attention to detail. So minutely observed that he wondered he had never noticed he was being so carefully watched. If he had ever felt that his father had not seen him, had overlooked him, these drawings gave the lie to any such thought.  

On the last page was a note, his father’s usually precise hand somehow softer and slanting slightly across the vellum.

_“If you could see him now, how straight and tall he has grown, how skillful and brave, how fine his nature, all of your foolish fears for him that I used to laugh at would be set at rest. It is my foolish fear that keeps him from what you wanted most for him. My daily sorrow remains that you are not here to provide what I cannot for the son who is so much yours, so much of you that it breaks my heart at times to look at him. Oh my dear, what you and I have made together…”_

The remaining words blurred suddenly and Legolas had to blink hard to see. He closed the little book, unable to read more and slipped it inside of his tunic. He turned from her and mounted his horse.

“You will not come?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Will you come back?”

His horse danced beneath him and he turned it so that he could see the Great Hall of Dale, where his father sat alone. The wall between them was only made of stone. What bound them together was made of stronger stuff.

_You will always know where to find me._

Legolas laid his hand over the little book, where it rested against his heart.

“Yes, Father,” he said and kicked his horse into a gallop.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit to my niece for suggesting there might be drawings of Legolas in the little book.
> 
> I am so sad to be done with this story. I loved writing it so much. Thank you to everyone who has read along!


End file.
